All Work, No Play
Say a little prayer for AI workers in Silicon Valley.
In the rush to conquer the AI sector, some startups have adopted a career schedule known as “996” — a draconian work regimen that first took hold in mainland China, according to Wired, in which employees work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week, for a total of a soul-crushing 72 hours.
That’s obviously a grueling routine, but the AI industry demands it because the space is so extremely competitive at the moment; startups are going to bat against each other, legacy tech companies, and overseas AI companies in places like China.
AI startups are gobbling up boatloads of money — $104.3 billion in the first six months of this year — so the race is on to turn those investment dollars into profit and market share. That pressure is pushing more startups towards the 996 schedule.
“It’s becoming increasingly common,” staffing and recruitment expert Adrian Kinnersley told Wire. “We have multiple clients where a prerequisite for screening candidates before they go for an interview is whether they are prepared to work 996.”
Back to the Future
A tough schedule is nothing new to Silicon Valley, which is stuffed to the gills with industry lore about tech stars booking all-nighters at “velvet sweatshops” like Microsoft.
“There’s a really strong and growing subculture of people, especially in my generation — Gen Z — who grew up listening to stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, entrepreneurs who dedicated their lives to building life-changing companies,” Will Gao, head of growth at AI startup Rilla, told Wired.
But the problem with this work schedule is it chucks out any pretense of work-life balance, taking a toll on the bodies and minds of workers.
It’s also a type of schedule could shut out certain sectors of the population from tech work, such as women — who are usually the primary caretakers of children and adult relatives — who already only make up 35 percent of the STEM workforce in the United States.
There’s also a dark irony at play: the basic promise of the AI industry is that it will provide an alternative to the soul-crushing jobs to which so many of us are now subjected — while the very workers tasked with creating that future are being treated like beasts of burden.
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